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Within the broad landscape of early childhood education and care politics and policies, calling quality reform into question is a political act. As numerous scholars have pointed out, policy structures that measure and identify what constitutes quality (and what does not) are not value-free and reflect neoliberal human capital economic agenda whose effects are rapidly changing early childhood work. This paper investigates how quality reform in the early childhood sector has reinvigorated historical distinctions between early education and early care to elevate early education as 'quality' via standardisation and systematisation regimes. Drawing on the Australian context as a local example relational to the global, the paper theorises that 'edu-quality' discourse and agenda problematically constructs early care work as intertwined with but also separate from early education inputs and outputs, attributing it unequal import and impact. The paper concludes by emphasising the need for sector stakeholders and advocates to challenge the ontological and epistemological distinctions and conflations that underpin edu-quality politics and policies.

The paper explores the policy logics of privatisation through service provision for students with English as an Additional language or dialect (EAL/D) in the state education system of Queensland, Australia. In the context of EAL/D, specifically targeted policy has been subsumed by a broader umbrella or meta-policy of inclusion, whilst at the same time, funding support for EAL/D learners is substantial. The devolution of EAL/D support to individual schools through autonomous targeted funding results in policy 'everywhere', distributed across broad portfolios dedicated to ensuring schools provide quality education services for all learners, but also 'nowhere', lacking systemic support and detail on how inclusion should be enacted for EAL/D and with no accountability placed on schools to demonstrate that they are addressing EAL/D learner needs. The co-location of EAL/D policy with a broad systemic policy of inclusion, the absence of systemic professional support, combined with devolution to school sites has had real effects on the policy in practice. The analysis demonstrates there is the potential opening of EAL/D provision to market forces at school sites, where the private sector can potentially sell commercial 'solutions' directly to schools, which have greater autonomy over one-line budgets.

While research investigating the mediatisation of education policy has primarily been undertaken in school contexts, this paper reports on a study conducted in the context of early childhood education. The paper examines how a major policy in early childhood education in Australia -- the National Quality Framework -- has been mediatised in selected newspapers. Drawing on Foucauldian, critical discourse analysis and mediatisation theorising, we utilised the corpus linguistic tools of WordSmith Tools 6.0 to inform content analyses of 121 articles from two major media corporations, News Corp and Fairfax. Our findings highlight the utility of treating our data as two distinct corpora, with each corporation found to have utilised discursive technologies to proffer competing positionings of the Framework. The contested nature of the Framework -- generally purported in Fairfax to be a tool that supports quality early education, as opposed to News Corp's framing of the policy as one that inhibits affordable childcare -- poses implications for which advocacy groups are regarded by the media as having authority and thus likely to influence policy through the reporting of their voices. Implications for newspaper media as a discursive influence on parents' childcare decision-making are also considered.

This paper examines the global policy convergence toward high-stakes testing in schools and the use of test results to "steer at a distance", particularly as it applies to policy-makers' promise to improve teacher quality. Using Deleuze's three syntheses of time in the context of the Australian policy blueprint Quality Education, this paper argues that using test scores to discipline teaching repeats the past habit of policy-making as continuing the problem of the unaccountable teacher. This results in local policy-making enfolding test scores in a pure past where the teacher-as-problem is resolved through the use of data from testing to deliver accountability and transparency. This use of the database returns a digitised form of inspection that is a repetition of the habit of teacher-as-problem. While dystopian possibilities are available through the database, in what Deleuze refers to as a control society, for us the challenge is to consider policy-making as a step into an unknown future, to engage with producing policy that is not grounded on the unconscious interiority of solving the teacher problem, but of imagining new ways of conceiving the relationship between policy-making and teaching.

This paper provides a critical analysis of the Australian government's education revolution policy as promulgated in the media release document, "Quality Education: The Case for an Education Revolution in our Schools". It seeks to problematize the government's claim to marry quality and equity, via an analysis of the discursive strategies of the Australian government's revolution talk. My analysis draws on the work of political theorists Jason Glynos and David Howarth and their synthesis of key ideas from Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory into a framework of explanatory "logics." This framework provides conceptual tools for conducting critical policy analysis, including: characterizing a discursive regime on a synchronic plane; accounting for its constitution, reproduction, and/or subversion on a diachronic plane; and explaining the ways in which it grips or seduces subjects at a nonrational level. Overall, the analysis of the education revolution in this paper demonstrates the value of this framework of explanatory logics for education policy analysis, in the process shedding some new light on the Australian government's education revolution policy agenda. (Contains 1 figure, 1 table and 7 notes.)

This paper examines Australian policy on quality for early childhood education and care (ECEC). It investigates the existing national quality assurance system, Quality Improvement and Accreditation System (QIAS) and its application in childcare centres. However, Australia's recently elected federal government has shown enormous interest in improving quality in ECEC with implications for policy change. While international research emphasises the importance of process quality Australian policy and practice has focused on structural quality. Further, ambiguity exists in defining quality in ECEC exacerbated by a dearth of Australian research. Five limitations of the current structural-based QIAS were identified based on international and national research. The paper argues for an urgent need to address the limitations of policy on quality childcare which should be driven by evidence-based process quality. (Contains 1 note and 1 figure.)

This paper reports on the findings of an in-depth genealogical study of the discourse of quality in Australian Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) policy. Quality reform has become the foremost global policy agenda for ECEC due to assumptions about the economic potentials of quality services. In Australia, the recent National Quality Framework elevated early childhood policy in Australia from the margins as the lynchpin of a broader economic reform agenda. However, quality ECEC--what it is and does- is a complex, contestable notion that could be considered problematic for the sector to execute, particularly through market models of provision. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of discourse as the 'already said', the truth assumptions that have underpinned policy uses of quality ECEC in Australia are identified and critiqued. It is shown that the discourse of quality has been tactically deployed in Australian ECEC policy to realign quality ECEC outcomes with educative outcomes, as a means for government to selectively grow and govern human capital. This positions quality as a high-stakes reform discourse for early childhood stakeholders, entwined with the expanded reach and intensification of selective, performance-related standards and incentives.

This paper investigates the commercialisation of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) in Australian schools. Specifically, it focuses on understanding why teachers value commercial resources, and how they enact these in their classrooms. Theorising around teacher agency suggests teachers are now choosing to use a range of commercial resources and view these as important additions to their pedagogical toolbox. Teachers want high quality resources, and they prefer resources that are easy to import, scaffold and modify according to their specific needs. Teachers did not readily see the benefit of a prescriptive SEL program. Instead, they wanted multiple resources that they could pick and choose the best bits from. Our data suggests that teachers are not being seduced by commercialisation and the 'easy fix' it promises, but are in fact presenting as agentic professionals who care deeply about students' social and emotional wellbeing and are working to tailor bespoke learning experiences to meet the needs of their students within their specific school contexts. We argue that it is worth nuancing the critique about commercialisation offered in the literature to date, and suggest that commercialisation is not inherently bad, rather it is the 'intensity' of commercialisation that needs to be regulated and further investigated.

This paper investigates how Australian universities are being disciplined to behave as commercial enterprises by the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA). The manual produced by AUQA, for the purpose of conducting audits of Australian universities, is analysed. I use an analytical framework that provides a means by which a text from the "manual" genre can be analysed with respect to social and political contexts, using Critical Discourse Analysis. I analyse changes in the language used in subsequent editions of the manual, drawing inferences about how the AUQA manual constructs universities to behave as particular kinds of business entities. Depictions of the globalised and virtualised university are silenced in the texts. Contrary to the rhetoric of the university being a flexible, globalised enterprise, I find that universities are constructed as localised businesses appearing to be independent of direct government control but nevertheless constrained in the scope of their operation. (Contains 1 figure.)

This paper reports a rhetorical analysis of policy texts illustrating the emergence of the mandatory Educational Leader role in early childhood services in Australia. We argue that policy texts before 2012 constructed a 'problem' of workforce quality in early childhood education and offered a new leadership configuration as a policy solution. We identify and critically address how this social architecture was constructed and made persuasive through key rhetorical devices, particularly the combined pathos of the vulnerable child and a logos of quality improvement. Initial analysis indicated an apparent contradiction between the economic rationalism of earlier (policy advice) texts and an emphasis on professional dispositions in the later (policy implementation) texts, when describing the Educational Leader. We argue, however, that these policy implementation documents reinforce, rather than contradict, a neoliberal economistic logos, because they attempt to form Educational Leaders as autonomous moral agents of neoliberal responsibilization. We conclude by considering some potential implications of our analysis for the early childhood field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the strong policy push to improve students' results on national literacy and numeracy tests - the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) - in the Australian state of Queensland influenced schooling practices, including teachers' learning. The paper argues the focus upon improved test scores on NAPLAN within schools was the result of sustained policy pressure for increased attention to such foci at national and state levels, and a broader political context in which rapid improvement in test results was considered imperative. However, implementation, (or what this paper describes more accurately as 'enactment') of the policy also revealed NAPLAN as providing evidence of students' learning, as useful for grouping students to help improve their literacy and numeracy capabilities, and as a stimulus for teacher professional development. Drawing upon the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the paper argues that even as more political concerns about comparing NAPLAN results with other states were recognised by educators, the field of schooling practices was characterised by a logic of active appropriation of political concerns about improved test scores by teachers, for more educative purposes. In this way, policy enactment in schools is characterised by competing interests, and involving not just interpretation, translation and critique but active appropriation of political concerns by teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]